Thursday, April 26, 2007

Look, I know it's TV Turnoff Week, but how could I resist watching a show on Channel 13 last night that started off with these opening paragraphs from Bill Moyers?

BILL MOYERS: Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn't have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on.

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

BILL MOYERS: As the WASHINGTON POST'S veteran reporter Walter Pincus would later report, the propaganda machine was run by the president's inner circle — officials who called themselves the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG..... You wrote that WHIG included Karl Rove, the chief of staff, Andrew Card, Mary Matalin, Condi Rice, Steven Hadley, Lewis Libby and they were in charge ofselling the war.

WALTER PINCUS: Selling the war. Yeah.

PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): Good evening. A long year has passed since enemies attacked our country.

BILL MOYERS: Their chief salesman had the best props at his disposal [spoken over a clip of Bush with the Statue of Liberty behind him on the 1st anniversary of 9/11/01]

PRESIDENT BUSH (9/11/02): …and we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.

WALTER PINCUS: They created that link.

BILL MOYERS: The marketing group?

WALTER PINCUS: The marketing group. And the link was a twofold link. One, he had weapons of mass destruction. And two, he supported terrorists. And they repeated it everyday. anybody who watches-- television these days knows you sell a product, not just by saying it once, by saying it over and over again with new spokesmen two, three times a day and it sinks into the public.

BILL MOYERS: But is there anything unusual about an administration marketing its policy?

WALTER PINCUS: It's, I think each administration has learned from the other, and with this group is just the cleverest I've ever seen-- and took it to new heights.

NORM SOLOMON: The TV, radio, print, other media outlets are as crucial to going to war as the bombs and the bullets and the planes. They're part of the arsenal, the propaganda weaponry, if you will. And that's totally understood across the board, at the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department.

COLIN POWELL (9/26/02): A proven menace like Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction

DONALD RUMSFELD (DOD Press Briefing 9/26/02): We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.

PRESIDENT BUSH: The regime has long standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.

BOB SIMON: Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Repeat Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Just keep it going. Keep that drum beat going. And it was effective because long after it was well established that there was no link between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq and the Saddam regime, the polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that Al Qaeda-- that Iraq was responsible for September 11th.

The Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast networks all come under fire in this show (as do the easy targets of the flag-waving cable news networks and saber-rattling pundits). The only heroes are two reporters for Knight Ridder (Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay) who saw the holes in the government's stories with basic fact checking rather than high-level cocktail party access to the lies of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.The New York Times STILL has not mentioned "WHIG" or the "White House Iraq Group" in its news pages even though one of their reporters, Judith Miller, has been exposed as their chief tool (or maybe even an honorary member of the Group). When the White House IranGroup starts feeding their reporters information from "Important High Level Administration Sources" (i.e., Liars), maybe the Times editors should think about the following quotation from a Knight Ridder editor before uncritically printing government "information" about Iranian WMDs on their influential front page.

BILL MOYERS: Knight Ridder's early skepticism was a rarity inside the beltway bubble…..

JOHN WALCOTT: A decision to go to war, even against an eighth-rate power such as Iraq, is the most serious decision that a government can ever make. And it deserves the most serious kind of scrutiny that we in the media can give it. Is this really necessary? Is it necessary to send our young men and women to go kill somebody else's young men and women?

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The little BlackBerry breakdown yesterday, which substantially slowed the moving and shaking of movers and shakers all across this great continent of ours, reminded me of my first sighting of one of these devices in use. I wish I had noted the date of this incident, but I didn't think at the time that this little gizmo would take quite the prominent place in our culture that it has in the past few years. So the date is inexact, but here's the scene:

Man#1 is watching Man#2 type on a tiny keyboard with his thumbs. Man #1: What's that thing?Man #2: A "Black Berry".Man #1: What are you doing?Man #2: I'm talking to my boss right now!Man #1: Why the fuck would you want to do that?

Why indeed? thought the man sitting across the aisle from them who was trying to read a book.

Is anyone else pissed about this? I voted for Jon Corzine and I probably will again, but I also drive on the Garden State Parkway in a Volkswagen, and I have a son with a fresh driver's license. What am I supposed to say to him about speeding when the New Jersey State Police not only do NOTHING to stop an average speed of 75-85 mph on a crowded 65-mph highway, but they treat this busy highway as their own personal racetrack. It's bad enough when they do it in their cruisers, but these top-heavy oversized trucks are potential murder weapons when driven at that speed.

I have this naive belief that nobody is important enough to speed unless they're responding to an emergency. The Governor of New Jersey is not a fireman, and he was not on his way to the scene of a crime. I know that most people in his position probably do it routinely, but I think they need to explain why (though the obvious answer, I'm afraid, is "because I can").

New drivers are also told that they are responsible for making sure that their passengers are belted. Why didn't this State Trooper/Chauffeur insist that his front seat passenger wear his seatbelt?

"...the trooper driving the vehicle, Robert J. Rasinski, had told investigators that he did not know how fast he was traveling as he led Mr. Corzine’s two-car caravan, emergency lights flashing, from an Atlantic City speech to a meeting at the governor’s mansion in Princeton."

Funny, but "I don't know how fast I was driving" is never an acceptable answer for a civilian to give a trooper.

The article is also very good on describing how the official SUV caused the crash, and also how it was breaking the rules of engagement for non-emergency government vehicles.

Monday, April 16, 2007

You won't see an ad for TV Turnoff Week on the tube, so spread the word any way you can in the next week; click on the link to get more information and ideas from Adbusters.org, and think about reading and signing their Media Carta.

But the most important thing is simply to turn it off.

"The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult – yet also how life-changing – a week spent unplugged can really be." --Adbusters.org

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The name of the man in the picture to the right will be forgotten before long. This is the first and last entry that will confront the readers of this blog with a picture of Don Imus, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen as he was uttering the slur heard round the world is telling. It shows something about the speed of news cycles; "..H RICHARDS SAID HE ONCE SNORTED..." of course refers to the big scandal that was breaking right before Imus created his own scandal, that Keith Richards said he had snorted his father's ashes in a cocaine mix. That story had legs about one inch long.

Now that CBS has followed NBC's lead by firing the original shock jock, he will quickly be replaced by another scandal on the front pages. But his story will be remembered and taught for years by those who work in the mass media. The uttering of casually sexist and racist "jokes" on the public airwaves (or basic cable) is now as clearly taboo as accidentally flashing a female breast during the Super Bowl halftime show or dropping an f-bomb. There's no gray area here. The next Imus who says something similar on the air will have his microphone pulled during the next commercial break.

And Don Imus will remember that it's not nice to fool with the Scarlet Knights. He started the conversation that ended his career by saying, "That's some rough girls from Rutgers." He had no idea. He had no idea that the real strength of these talented young women was in their intelligence and their quiet dignity. While others (including this blogger) immediately jumped into the fray, they showed how vile Don Imus's comments were just by being themselves (and making all of us with connections to Rutgers even prouder to be Scarlet Knights than we already were!).

When I think about my own death, I don't console myself with the idea that my descendants and my books and all that will live on. Anybody with any sense knows that the whole solar system will go up like a celluloid collar by-and-by. I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment lasts forever.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

It may turn out to seem like a Pyrrhic victory when some right-wing pressure group leans on sponsors to get rid of something we like on the radio (though we only listen to NPR, which doesn't have sponsors), but for now it's just a victory. It was for the money (or fear of losing it) that major American corporations, afraid of being tarred as sponsors of racism, caused another major American corporation, NBC Universal (a subsidiary of General Electric), to pull the plug on the cameras this evening.

It would have been nice if NBC has made the decision immediately, a week ago, for less mercenary reasons, but it still feels good to know that this insult against the Scarlet Knights, women, and African Americans, has finally been appropriately addressed. The online announcement included the key lines here:

The network’s decision came after a growing list of sponsors — including American Express Co., Staples Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and General Motors Corp. — said they were pulling ads from Imus’ show for the indefinite future.

But it did not end calls for Imus to be fired from the radio portion of his program. The show originates from WFAN-AM in New York City and is syndicated nationally by Westwood One, both of which are managed by CBS Corp. For its part, CBS has not announced plans to discontinue the show.

If the sponsors don't get to WFAN to pull the plug on his microphone, then the pressure has to be put on athletes to follow Cal Ripken's example and refuse to deal with Imus or his sports-talk station. I don't think it will take even that much though. CBS will not want to look more racist than NBC. It's as simple as that, or it should be.

OBAMA & HILLARY ARE TIED

Later in the MSNBC announcement was this bit about Barack Obama's statement today on Imus and the young women of Rutgers:

Before the announcement was made, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had appeared on the MSNBC program "Hardball," where host David Gregory asked the senator and presidential candidate if he thought Imus should be fired.

"I don't think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day," Obama said.

He went on to note that he and his wife have "two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope, at some point, are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships. ... I don't want them to be getting a bunch of information that, somehow, they're less than anybody else. And I don't think MSNBC should want to promote that kind of language."

Obama went on to say that he would not be a guest on Imus' show in the future.

So, based on the statement I made in my last entry, both Obama and Clinton gained a point today in my early calculations to see who I'm voting for in the New Jersey primary next year.

The Rutgers Women are starring on the front page of HillaryClinton.com this afternoon with a call to "Join Hillary in sending the young women of Rutgers a message of respect and support."

We here at trueblueliberal.org haven't yet made our decision about who we're voting for in the primary of 2008, but we have to say that putting the women of our favorite university on your splash page certainly earns you a brownie point (we should also warn candidates that any appearance on Imus in the Morning that we hear about will earn a candidate a minimum of 10 demerits -- yes, we are keeping very careful score!)

... being held by my fellow commuters on the way to work this morning.

Every article about this scandal from now until the name "Don Imus" is long forgotten, should include at least as many pictures or profiles of these dedicated, talented, and intelligent young women as it does of the cowboy-hatted one (and has anyone else noticed how the cowboy hat suddenly disappeared when he stared The Apology Tour -- was that the work of a style consultant trying to tone down his swagger?).

And CBS radio and MSNBC should give C. Vivian Stringer a show of her own, but only in the off season, of course. Her contract is up at Rutgers this year, but it's just as important for the university to reward her appropriately as it is for us to retain Greg Schiano.

I'll say it again. I've never been prouder of my school since I started at Rutgers College in the fall of 1973!

Yesterday I asked: "Where are the high profile CBS and NBC personalities? Are they working behind the scenes to cleanse the racism from their organization? Do any of them have the guts to actually speak out about this stain on the network that feeds them? "

Well, here's one, as far as I know the first one, Al Roker, and he does so with logic and without pulling his punches:

The “I’m a good person who said a bad thing” apology doesn’t cut it. At least he didn’t try to weasel out of this by hiding behind alcohol or drug abuse. Still, he said it and a two-week suspension doesn’t cut it. It is, at best, a slap on the wrist. A vacation. Nothing.

The general manager of Cartoon Network resigned after a publicity stunt went wrong and caused a panic in Boston. He did the right thing. Don Imus should do the right thing and resign. Not talk about taking a two-week suspension with dignity. I don’t think Don Imus gets it.

After watching and listening to him this morning during an interview with Matt Lauer, Don Imus doesn’t get it. Maybe it’s being stuck in a studio for 35 years or being stuck in the 1980’s. Either way, it’s obvious that he needs to move on. Citing “context within a comedy show” is not an excuse.

He has to take his punishment and start over. Guess what? He’ll get re-hired and we’ll go on like nothing happened. CBS Radio and NBC News needs to remove Don Imus from the airwaves. That is what needs to happen. Otherwise, it just looks like profits and ratings rule over decency and justice.(http://allday.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/04/10/116906.aspx)

THANK YOU AL, but where are your white colleagues? Without a broad multi-hued opposition, we'll continue to see comments like those at the bottom of your blog entry -- the typical boilerplate racist defenses of Imus and non-sequiturial and nonsensical attacks on Al Sharpton and gangster rappers (I didn't read them all, but you just know that some "wit" has already decided to call you "Reverend Al Roker").

Monday, April 09, 2007

When Don Imus said to Al Sharpton this afternoon, "I can't get anyplace with you people," it became more obvious than ever that he lives in a world that is sharply divided between black and white. "You people" can only be taken one way. The other key statement from his interview with Reverend Sharpton is that he has no intention of resigning. It's also clear, after 40 years in the business, that he's not changing his stripes. He is who he is, and he's not leaving on his own.

The FCC (according to reports on CBS News tonight) will take no action because no nipples or f-words were involved.

So, with neither resignation nor government action imminent, the ball is now totally in the court of CBS (owner of his radio outlet) and NBC (owner of his television simulcaster). They either need to pull the plug on his microphone, or they are officially condoning racist slurs and the ability of old men to comment on the appearance and sexual habits of very young women.

This evening MSNBC administered its first wrist slap, but a two-week hiatus in the simulcast cannot be considered a punishment

And by the way, "You People" does not just include the "You People" of whom Al Sharpton is a member. There is also the sexist component of the term "nappy-headed hos" that has millions of women understandably upset. Here is an easy to follow campaign organized by the National Organization for Women that will help you send letters to the appropriate people at CBS and NBC.

Where are the high profile CBS and NBC personalities? Are they working behind the scenes to cleanse the racism from their organization? Do any of them have the guts to actually speak out about this stain on the network that feeds them? THAT probably would lead to a firing. This is America in 2007, where you can say anything you want about people younger and darker and weaker than you, but leave your bosses alone.

Where are the high profile professional athletes? How quickly would WFAN-AM in New York drop Imus if Derek Jeter and Eli Manning and David Wright refused to interact with that sports radio station until the I-man was gone? I'm pleased to see that Cal Ripken is the first guest to cancel a scheduled Imus appearance, so maybe that wall is breaking too, but it is amazing to see, over and over again, how people get more cowardly when they have more to lose.

If the NBCBS overlords don't drop him soon the Rutgers football Scarlet-White Game on April 21 will become the "April 21 Anti-Imus Rutgers Stadium Rally."

--------------------------------UPDATE: Now CBS Radio has suspended Imus for two weeks"due to the events of the past week." (i.e., the protests, not the hateful comments about Rutgers women made on April 4). If he comes back onto CBS radio and MSNBC simulcasting in 2 weeks, it means that NBCBS is knowingly rehiring a racist, and the protest, at least on this site, will be twice as loud.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

... and destroying stereotypes seems to have become the raison d'être of this blog all of a sudden.

There's a real danger that with the entry of Al Sharpton into the debate about Don Imus's right to use the public airwaves to call young women of Rutgers by hateful sexist and racist names, Imus's defenders will now try to turn this into the Don vs. Al Show, a show that goes back at least a decade. So I looked for instances where these men have interacted in the past. Along with the expected finds about Rev. Sharpton's voice being imitated on the show in an Amos'n'Andy show manner, I found the following coincidental juxtaposition of articles in a Media Life Magazine news page from March 28, 2005. It was worth a screen capture; just click the picture to enlarge to full screen or click here to see it in its original setting (just scroll to the bottom).

The Imus article at the top of the screen is an answer to the Imus fans who say, "Don't attack Don. He does more for charity than anybody!" (It also says a little something about his legendary thin skin)

The Sharpton article is an interesting answer to the other point made by those fans: "Don't attack Don for calling people 'nappy-headed ho's' unless you attack the rappers who use that language too." (not that too many of those rappers are simultaneously broadcast by CBS & NBC every morning)

I hope that this issue -- this important debate about the acceptability of casual racism and sexism on the air -- doesn't boil down to the Don vs. Al Show, but if it does, I'm 100% on Rev. Sharpton's side!

The real question is not a question of free speech, though Imus's apologists would have you believe it is.

The real issue is why CBS (owners of WFAN-AM) and NBC (his Cable TV simulcasters) are not RACING to fire Imus to see which is more anxious to remove its corporate imprimatur from the racist and sexist "jokes" being broadcast during family listening and viewing hours.

Since neither CBS nor NBC feels the need to respond to nor acknowledge correspondence from the public, our only recourse is to directly contact the government agency charged with protecting the public airways against indecency.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Is there ANY reason that Don Imus and his two stooges haven't been fired yet for their recent racist remarks on the radio and on MSNBC??Another inevitable empty Imus apology ("Sorry, we were all drunk and senile again") should not be enough.

I posted this same transcript late last night on BeatVisitor.com, but the more I think about it, the more angry I get, and the more I want to get the message out that this is totally unacceptable in the mainstream American media. It is certainly more offensive than any imaginable televised wardrobe malfunction, but this morning WNBC (New York) has a poll on their article about this incident in which only 27% of the respondents say that what Imus said deserves punishment.

Imagine that we were talking about Rutgers football instead of women's basketball.

Imagine we run across a newspaper from 1917 in which the great Paul Robeson of Rutgers is being described as ugly and "nappy-headed"and being compared to the "cute" Princeton backfield of Mitt Buffington, Peter "Pippi" Longstocking, and P.T. Boatwright the Fourth. Of course we'd call it a sad remnant of America's shameful racist past.

BUT WHAT IS DON IMUS DOING ON NATIONAL RADIO AND TV IN THE 21ST CENTURY???

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

About Me

According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!